Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Leon Trotsky commenting on the Moscow Trials.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By and Films To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
Leon Trotsky: Downfall Of A Revolutionary, Betrand Patenaude, Harper, New York, 2009
As I noted in a recent review of Professor Robert Service’s biography, Trotsky, the spirit of the great Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, animates the political material reviewed in this space, and is some senses the way the materials are presented make no sense without acknowledging that hard truth. I have also noted, as well, that of all the biographies, sketches, memoirs, etc. concerning the life and times of this extraordinary revolutionary that Isaac Deutscher’s three volume Prophet series done in the 1950s and 1960s still, to my mind, is the definitive such study of the man. As I also noted in the above-mentioned review after reading that Trotsky biography and this more specialized volume that centers on the last period of his life and his subsequent assassination by a Stalinist agent down in Mexico in 1940, both which have the benefit of the latest in archival, particularly Soviet archival, material I still hold to that opinion. However, the present book under review, by looking at Trotsky’s life from the perspective of his last years in exile and projecting back to the highlights of his earlier career and deeds was an interesting quick read on Trotsky’s life for those who need a fairly short primer on his life.
As I also stated in the Service review I admit to being somewhat surprised by Professor Patenaude‘s book. Not, as might be expected, for its veiled liberal disdain for the Soviet experiment and for Bolshevism. That kind of expectation comes with wading into liberal academic territory. It is, moreover, old hat by now and gets one no closer to the core of Trotsky’s place in world revolutionary history than most of the other Trotsky books written from that hardly exclusive perspective. What is surprising is that Professor Patenaude felt the need to write a biography of the fallen revolutionary Leon Trotsky in the year 2009 long after his ghost, and that of the Soviet Union, that he was instrumental in creating, especially its military structure, have left the scene. Furthermore, as with Professor Service’s book, while I believe this book has a certain merit as a contemporary Trotsky primer it certainly has not revealed much new in the way of biographical material despite the opening up of the archives. That is the sense, or one of the senses, that I mean when I say I continue to stand in awe of Isaac Deutscher’s exhaustive study.
For those not familiar with Trotsky’s life the good professor sketchily projects back to his Ukrainian Jewish childhood, his early pre-revolutionary academic activities, and his emersion into the Russian revolutionary milieu in Russia and in exile at the turn of the 20th century. He notes Trotsky’s very public leadership of the Russian revolution of 1905 as chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet and after its defeat its political defense, the pre-World War I free agent journalist period during which he attempted to bring the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions together and earned the scorn of both sides, and the struggle against World War I and the betrayal of internationalism by the Second International. Time is spent on the 1917 February and October revolutions in Russia where Trotsky linked his fate with the Bolsheviks and became a central leader of that party and of the Soviet state, the subsequent civil war to defend that October revolution, and Trotsky’s key role in creating the Red Army and the Communist International. He also details the post-Lenin inner-Bolshevik Party struggle where Trotsky’s star started to fate, and in the aftermath his internal and then eternal exiles, highlighted by the Mexican exile, after his defeats at the hands of Stalin, and his fight to create the stillborn Fourth International to replace the Communist International in the fight for world socialist revolution. And, of course, he goes in great depth about the set-up of his assassination at the hands of a Stalinist agent in 1940. Along the way he also gives scope to Trotsky’s wide ranging literary and intellectual interests that permitted him to continue to make his mark on the political world after his exile, to make a living, and to fund his various political projects.
In one sense it is hard for a biographer, any biographer, to say something new about such an open book political man as Leon Trotsky. Both because he wrote much, including his memoirs, about his political life and his positions from early on well before the Russian Revolution of 1905 and because the events that he was associated with left little room for not previously making it onto the pages of history. So what is left for a biographer? Well, since no one has scoured the newly opened archives and found that Trotsky really did take German gold during World War I. Or that he really, as charged in the Moscow trials, was an agent of the Mikado, British imperialism or Hitlerite Germany then what is left is speculation, now apparently endless speculation, about his personal character flaws.
This is actually the ground that makes this book, like Professor Service’s, interesting as he, like others before him detail Trotsky’s prickly personality, his failure to suffer fools gladly (or at all) either close political associates or distant foes, his aloofness and haughtiness that made him less than the perfect choice for leadership of political factions in the struggle for power. Those, in the end, were a key to Trotsky’s political undoing. Professor Patenaude also details more extensively than I have seen elsewhere some of Trotsky private moments like his late life affair with the Mexican surrealist/naturalist artist, Frida Kahlo (and wife of muralist Diego Rivera), his bumpy road passion for his long suffering wife and companion, Natalia, his myriad health issues and his strained relationships with most of his kin folk.
For those who have not read a previous Trotsky biography and who understand that Professor Patenaude's work is a mere sketch of the vast number of issues and events that Trotsky’s life represented then there is much that can be gleaned from his work. But, I always come back to when dealing with the life of the much maligned, besmirched, and denigrated revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky, warts and all, comes as close as any historic figure that has come out of bourgeois society to being the proto-type for the new communist man that humankind has produced thus far. In that sense Leon Trotsky is in need of no certificate of revolutionary good conduct from the good professor, ex-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, this writer or the reader. Enough said.
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